Everything I know about
grammar I learned from my father. He was the original grammar nerd.

If I knocked on Daddy’s
study door and he asked, “Who is it?” I knew better than to say, “It’s me.” But
if I slipped up, he was sure to raise his voice and respond, “It is I.” It
wasn’t the contraction he objected to—it was the pronoun.

I also learned not to
start a request with the words, “Can I . . . .” His response was always, “You
can, but may you?”

My mother believed in
using correct grammar, too, although she didn’t highlight our errors the way
Daddy did. I do, however, remember her displeasure with billboards that
proclaimed, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” She didn’t approve
of smoking, but the use of “like” instead of “as” seemed to bother her even
more.

I must have picked up
some knowledge in school, too, so the statement at the top of this post isn’t technically
accurate. I should probably say, “Most of what I know about grammar I learned
from my parents.”

But I stand by the way I
said it.

When I was a child, Daddy
and Mama frowned on starting sentences with “but,” too. But language is not
static, and beginning a sentence with a conjunction is no longer a major sin.

At least not with most
audiences. There are still some contexts—mainly academic—where formality is
expected. A good writer knows his or her audience and writes for it.

Even in less formal
contexts, writers should understand the rules. Many break them, as I did by
starting the last paragraph with a sentence fragment. But there are two ways to
break the rules. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—only one of them works.

Some writers break the
rules because they don’t know what they are. Since rules exist for a purpose,
these writers often come across as uneducated. Even worse, the primary reason
for grammar rules is to create clarity, so people who ignore them may lose
their readers in the morass.

Others know the rules but
break them intentionally in order to achieve a certain effect. That sentence
fragment is punchier and more in-your-face than if I had said, “Most audiences
no longer consider it a major sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction.” And
for fiction writers, sentence fragments can speed up the action, especially in
a thriller.

So what’s my point? It’s
okay to break the grammar rules to achieve a certain effect. But you need to
know them before you break them. Otherwise, your reader may not make it through
the story or the essay or even the blog post.

Or you may find my
father’s ghost standing before you and declaring, “It is I.”